Ching-yuan Wei-hsin, a Chinese Ch'an master, once said this:
Thirty years ago, when having not studied Ch'an, this monk saw mountain was mountains and water was water.
Later, when following the good teacher's guide, this monk...
continue...

When you are taking a walk and finding yourself in this section: "CT's Collected Words" which are a collection of the words which ChonTri occasionally talked to the friends who came and talked to him about five years now, since 1999. For reference, each of the talks or conversations which - were cut short and edited as you will see - got a temporary tilte and the date at the bottom of the page.

If you would like to read and you actually read them, and - in a flash - you could grasp something that those words were trying to point to, that's good, because it would be your own wisdom's manifestation, and the words had nothing to do with that.

And it would be much better if you could forget those words as soon as possible after the moment your own wisdom manifests itself.

If you read them and you find out that those words are useless to you or you disagree with what they were trying to point to, just disregard or ignore them.

In case, you got your own tool, you could stand up yourself and do your own job. This would be excellent.

If you would not like to read them and walk away, it would be fine, too.

In whichever case - as mentioned above - the words in the "CT's Collected Words" section were no way the teaching to anyone about anything or a golden ruler to measure anything or to evaluate anyone. So, do not waste your time in taking them as something to chew, to argue, to debate or to criticize... If you do so, it would not be good at all to yourself or to the ones who used those words and would get yourself in confusion or waste your time in vain.

All of those words were just a means to communicate to some friends in some cases, no more no less. In other words, they were like a tool, when as friends - no one here is a teacher or a student of the other - we got together and used words as a means to convey what we have examined or explored or discovered ourselves and things around us and learned from that. This did not mean what others often refer to as "enlightenment" or "satori".

Take care,

ChonTri

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